The butterfly effect: now it’s Bluesky’s turn
The umpteenth Twitter/X crisis has caused another large migration of users, this time to Bluesky. The ecosystem of social networks is changing again, while digital citizens are once again asking themselves what to do.
Network cycles
Throughout the history of social media, there have been cycles of user migration between platforms. From forums to blogs, then to photo-sharing sites, to video blogs, to microblogs, to podcasts, to newsletters, to instant messaging, to professional networks, to academic networks, and back again. After all, we will eventually acknowledge that RSS feeds were a great invention.
When Elon Musk landed on Twitter in October 2022, and began to dismantle the company and drive away its most loyal users, the star destination was another microblogging network that was at its antipodes: Mastodon.
Network users began to realize that they need to move away from platforms to protocols. Mastodon showed the way to distributed networks, based on free software and open protocols, which would allow the Internet to become an interoperable space again, a federation, and not a private club.
The new wave
With the company rebranded to X and its CEO becoming a political activist, after the US elections on November 5, a mass migration of users began, this time turning to a platform that had been born as a project within Twitter to explore the potential of distributed networks and open protocols: Bluesky.
Unlike the previous migration, in this case the wave is heading towards a platform financed by private investors and venture capitalists offering a free service without advertising. We already know who the product is.
One of the great paradoxes of migration is that users do not necessarily lean towards the best option from a technical or philosophical point of view, but rather towards the alternative chosen by the majority of their circle of reference.
In a way, it is absurd to angrily walk away from X and end up with other commercial platforms that are still controlled by their owners and not by their users.
The news of the last few days about the dizzying growth of Bluesky (at the time of writing, almost 24M users), in synergy with the announced abandonments of X by large companies, media outlets, influencers and universities, have sown confusion among friends and strangers and no one seems to know very well what to expect.
Should we leave X?
First of all, it is necessary to clarify the proclaimed abandonments of the platform. It is necessary to distinguish between deleting an account and ceasing to publish content while keeping the account active (which is what has actually happened with The Guardian and La Vanguardia, for example).
Although it should be protected, it is not advisable to delete the account as X can reassign the vacated username to a new user who requests it, which carries potential reputational risks.
Continuing to post on X or not doing so is optional, but abandoning a personal or corporate brand on a social network is almost always a bad decision.
Why are users migrating to Bluesky?
At Bluesky, the platform experience, as it was the case in the early days of Twitter, depends on the user’s decisions: the content of the timeline is a function of the accounts followed and is not algorithmically mediated.
In fact, in this network, both the content algorithms (feeds) and the moderation lists (labelers) operate in a community-based, non-centralized manner.
What is the future of Bluesky?
The microblogging ecosystem is currently torn between four platforms: X, Threads, Mastodon and Bluesky. The first two are centralized networks with proprietary software governed by eccentric billionaires.
Mastodon should be the future, but it still lacks massive user support due to its technical and cultural peculiarities. And Bluesky will have to manage its own growth crisis in order to scale and find ways to return for its investors without damaging the experience of its users. It is foreseeable that sooner rather than later it will begin to offer premium services.
What have we learned from successive social media crises?
The history of social media shows how users of “free” platforms always end up making the same mistakes, handing over our time, our data and our content to companies that first convert them into money and then, directly, appropriate them.
Right now, for example, we don’t own our communities on X or Instagram: our content isn’t shown to all of our followers. The message that commercial platforms send us is that if we want reach, from now on, we’ll have to pay for it.
For a long time we thought we were building a planetary agora at Twitter, until we discovered we’d been trapped in the walled garden of a billionaire with political ambitions.
If there is one thing we should have learned over the years, it is that as users and content creators, we should opt for protocols that allow us to manage, preserve and transport our data, content and communities beyond the platforms and their black boxes.
That’s why RSS feeds are making a comeback, and why podcasts and newsletters are succeeding: they provide a bypass of the tyranny of algorithms.
Meanwhile, at Bluesky we have restored a conversational environment that had long been degraded on Twitter/X; the developer ecosystem around an open API is also being restored, and there are more and more tools that allow users to manage that network in a personalized and decentralized way.
The big question, once again, will be who will end up paying for the party.
This article has been translated using Google Translate. Original text in Spanish: El efecto mariposa: ahora toca Bluesky (LinkedIn, 4/12/24).
